Euphoria

by Lily King

  ‘The only thing worse than being out of that room is being in that room,’ she said.

  I wanted to say so much. I wanted to acknowledge with her what had happened, how we had let it happen, why we had let it happen. I wanted to tell her Fen had made it clear to me from the start that this flute was what he was after and that I had done nothing to stop him, only taken full advantage of his absence. But I wanted to say it all lying down again with her, holding her in my arms. ‘I should have gone after him straightaway, as soon as I saw the note.’

  ‘You couldn’t have caught up with him.’ She ran her finger along the edge of the teacup. ‘And you certainly wouldn’t have persuaded him otherwise.’ She was wearing the sweater again. She hadn’t looked up at me yet.

  ‘I wanted that time with you,’ I said. ‘I wanted it more than I’ve wanted anything in my life.’ These last words surprised me. The truth of them made me start to shake. When she didn’t respond, I said, ‘I can’t regret that. It was perfect.’

  ‘Worth a man’s life?’

  ‘Was what worth a man’s life?’ Fen said. He’d come in a side door behind me.

  ‘Your flute,’ Nell said.

  He frowned, as if she were a child who’d been cheeky, and told an approaching waiter to fetch him a chair. He’d bathed and shaved and smelled like the West.

  Again we wandered. We walked through the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We looked at the watercolors by Julian Ashton and a new exhibit of Aboriginal bark paintings. We sat at a café with tables outdoors, like in the New Yorker drawing. We ordered things we hadn’t seen in years: veal, Welsh rarebit, spaghetti. But none of us ate more than a few bites of any of it.

  On the way back to the Black Opal I saw that Nell’s limp was worse.

  ‘It’s not my ankle,’ she said. ‘It’s these shoes I haven’t worn for two years.’

  When we passed a chemist’s I stayed back and slipped inside. The girl behind the counter looked part Aboriginal, rare for a shopkeeper in Sydney then. She passed me the box without speaking.

  ‘I think I can pay for my wife’s plasters,’ Fen said, pushing me aside to give her the money.

  At the hotel the clerk handed us a note from Claire Iynes, an anthropologist at the University of Sydney, inviting us to dinner.

  ‘How’d she know we were here?’ Nell said.

  ‘I rang her up yesterday,’ Fen said.

  He wanted to tell her about the flute.

  ‘Dinner? How are we to go to a dinner, Fen?’

  ‘There’s a dress shop two doors down, miss,’ the clerk said. ‘Hair and beauty across the street. Fix you up smart.’

  A cab took us up to Double Bay, where Claire and her husband lived, just above Redleaf Pool.

  ‘Poshy posh,’ Fen said out the window to the large houses on the water. He brought his head back in. ‘Claire has moved up in the world. What did she marry into?’

  ‘Mining, I think. Silver or copper,’ Nell said, the first sentences she’d uttered since we’d gotten the invitation.

  Fen smirked at me. ‘Bankson doesn’t like it when the colonists talk about where money comes from.’

  It wasn’t a large dinner, nine of us around a small table in what seemed to be a drawing room. The vast dining room was on the other side of the house, too big, we were told, for four couples and the English hanger-on. No one knew quite what to make of my presence. I wasn’t headed home; I wasn’t finished with my fieldwork. We hadn’t thought this through. It highlighted even for us the fact that I’d followed them all the way here with no good reason. I think I had been waiting all along for Fen to say ‘Why are you here, Bankson? Why don’t you leave us the hell alone?’ Because my only reason, the reason he knew as well as I, was that I was in love with his wife. He could have called me out anytime, and he could have done it right there with witnesses in the Iyneses’ house, but instead he said, ‘He’s been ill. Seizures. We thought he should see a doctor.’

  There was a long discussion about doctors in Sydney and who would be the best for mysterious tropical diseases. Eventually Fen rerouted them with talk of our ‘breakthrough,’ he called it, our grid, and we spent most of the evening mapping out the guests and mutual acquaintances, of which there were many. One man with a great heavy moustache knew Bett from a project he’d done in Rabaul; another had read zoology with my father at Cambridge. Claire seemed to know every anthropologist we could name, and caught us up on the department gossip in three different countries.

  Fen flourished in fresh company, bringing out all the Mumbanyo stories with which he once entertained me. I watched him twirl his wineglass, eat prawns with a sterling silver oyster fork, accept a light from an engraved lighter—this man I’d seen shit off the side of a bark canoe, covered in another man’s blood. I saw then that any remorse he’d shown us had been an act. He was exuberant, a man who was just about to seize hold of the best stretch of his life. He fed off of Nell’s and my disorientation.

  I’d been put beside Mrs. Isabel Swale. Her husband, Arthur, already sozzled when we’d arrived, had drunk himself into an aphasic stupor and followed the conversation stupidly, as a dog follows the ball during a game of tennis. Mrs. Swale badgered me with questions about the Kiona without listening to the answers, so that her inquiry was disjointed and did not create anything resembling a conversation. Her left leg, bare through a slit in her gown, came closer and closer to me and by dessert was pressed alongside my own. All of her gestures—the way she leaned her lips to my ear, knocked her head back in a sudden and inexplicable laugh, examined the black beneath my fingernails—would have indicated to others at the table that we had struck a sudden, intimate connection. Nell shot me a few direct and withering looks, and I found I was pleased to see any emotion for me at all cross her face. At the far end of the table, Fen talked quietly to Claire Iynes.

  After dinner, Colonel Iynes invited the men to have a look at his collection of antique weapons, and Claire led the women off through the house for digestifs on the back patio. I lagged behind the men, heard Fen drop his voice and tell the Colonel he was in possession of a rare artifact himself, then I turned around. In a narrow passageway before the kitchen, I took Nell’s wrist and held her back.

  ‘You do quite well in civilization, particularly with the ladies,’ she said. ‘Much better than you have let on.’

  ‘Please, let’s not play at anything.’

  Her face was as pale and hollowed out as when I first met her.

  ‘Stay with me,’ I said. ‘Stay with me and come back to the Kiona. Stay with me and come to England. Stay with me and we’ll go anywhere you like. Fiji,’ I said desperately. ‘Bali.’

  ‘I keep thinking of how when we first arrived we thought Xambun was a god, a spirit. Some powerful dead man. And now he is.’ She started to say something else but it got caught and she leaned against me.

  I held her as she wept. I stroked her hair, loose and slightly matted. ‘Stay here with me. Or let me come with you.’

  She pulled me down to kiss her. Warm. Briny.

  ‘I love you,’ she said, her lips still against mine. But it meant no.

  She was silent on the way back down to the city, and went directly to her room without a word to either of us.

  Fen held up a bottle of cognac the Colonel had given him. ‘Quick drink? Help us sleep.’

  I doubted he had trouble sleeping, but I followed him to his room. I didn’t want to go, but there was some part of me that felt we could work this out. In this situation a Kiona man would offer the other fellow a few spears, an axe, and some betel nut, and then the wife was his.

  Fen’s room was identical to mine but at the other end of the hallway. Same green walls and knitted white counterpane on the single bed. He poured the brandy into two glasses on a tray by the bed and handed me one.

  His bags were splayed open by the window but the flute was not among them. There were no closets or wardrobes and it wouldn’t have fit in the small chest of drawers by the door.

/>   ‘It’s under the bed.’ He set his glass back on the tray and rolled the flute out a few feet. It was still wrapped in towels and tied with twine, but loosely now, as if he’d gotten tired of all the wrapping and unwrapping.

  ‘It’s magnificent, Bankson. Better than I remembered. Glyphs carved all over it.’ He bent down to untie the string.

  ‘No. Don’t. I don’t want to see it.’

  ‘Yes, you do.’

  He was right. I did. I wanted to prove him a liar. The isolated, alienating Mumbanyo with a logographic system of writing? No. Much as I wanted to prove him wrong, I would not give him the pleasure of unveiling it to me. ‘I don’t, Fen.’

  ‘Suit yourself. You’ll have to wait until it’s under glass then. Claire and the Colonel think I’ll have my pick of museums, when I’m ready.’ He sat on the bed and pointed to a black chair against the wall. ‘Pull up a seat.’

  The swaddled flute lay on the floor between us. I drank my cognac fast, in two sips. I planned to stand up and leave, but Fen refilled my glass before I had moved.

  ‘I did not steal it,’ he said. ‘It was given to me in a ceremony two nights before we left. They taught me how to care for it and feed it and it was when I was spooning a bit of dried fish to its mouth that I saw the writing etched into the wood. Abapenamo said only great men could be taught it. I asked if I was a great man and he said I was. Then Kolekamban busted in with his three brothers. He said the flute had always belonged to their clan, not Abapenamo’s, and they grabbed it. A few of Abapenamo’s men wanted to go after him but I knew it would end badly. So I stopped them. I kept the peace. Abapenamo’s son told me where they would take it and I figured I could come back. I knew I couldn’t leave the region without it. You can’t walk away from a piece of the human puzzle. But I wanted to get it back peaceably, without anyone getting hurt.’

  I let the miserable failure of that plan hang in the room. I thought of how initially he’d asked me to be his partner on this mission, asked me to risk my life for his delusions. I could have been the corpse in the canoe.

  ‘Why didn’t they shoot at you, Fen?’

  ‘I told you. I used the Dobu spell.’

  ‘Fen.’

  I could tell he wanted to convince me of this, but he also wanted to keep my attention. He was like a little boy who didn’t want to be left alone in the dark. ‘I think Xambun wanted to die,’ he said. ‘I think he tried to die.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘The first night we slept a few hours in the bush outside the village. I woke up and found him holding my revolver.’

  ‘Pointing it at something?’

  ‘No, just holding it in his hands. I don’t think he wanted to kill me. He might have been working up the courage to shoot himself. I took it away and he never reached for it again. We sorted out our route and waited till sunset. He was stealthy and quiet, probably an excellent hunter, but once we got the flute he got careless, like he wanted someone to know we were there. We were far away from the village but some dogs heard us first. I knew we could still make it to the canoe and we did, but he wouldn’t lie down. He started screaming a bunch of nonsense and I would have shoved him down but I had to start the engine and steer us out of there. I don’t get it. I promised him a quarter of the cash from this thing.’

  It was hard to know how much to believe. I wasn’t sure it mattered anyway. Xambun was dead. The S S Calgaric would leave the next day at noon.

  I made to get up from my black chair.

  ‘I saw you on the beach with her,’ he said. ‘I knew what would happen. I’m not stupid. You knew I’d go and I knew you wouldn’t stop me. But you can’t have Nell like you can have other girls. She says she’s Southern but she’s not on the Grid. She’s a different type altogether. Trust me on that one.’

  He refilled my glass. We’d nearly drunk the bottle.

  ‘What type is she?’

  ‘Damned if I ever let you find out.’

  This time I did get up. He stood, too.

  ‘I had to get that flute,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? There has to be a balance. A man can’t be without power—it doesn’t work like that. What was I going to do, write little books behind hers like a fucking echo? I needed something big. And this is big. Books on this thing will write themselves.’

  ‘In blood-red ink, Fen.’

  On the way back down the hallway were the stairs to the third floor. I hesitated, and then continued to my room. I opened the door as quietly as I could, in case she could hear my movements as I could hear hers. I didn’t want to wake her and I didn’t want her to know I’d been drinking with Fen. I lay on the bed in my clothes and stared up at the white swirled plaster. It was silent. I hoped she’d managed to fall asleep. My bed felt more comfortable than it had the previous nights and despite the slight spinning, Fen had been right: the cognac was going to allow me to sleep. I drifted down into it.

  I awoke to pounding. Louder, and louder still. Then her door opening. All I could hear were footsteps and the low buzz of voices, first in the doorway then all over the small room. As their voices grew stronger their feet moved faster, back and forth above me. Something hit the floor hard. My body was on the stairs then pounding on her door before my mind caught up.

  ‘Your boyfriend’s here,’ I heard Fen say.

  ‘Let me in.’

  A man across the hall said, ‘Belt up, will you?”

  The door opened.

  Nell was in her nightgown at the end of the bed.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Please, let’s not get thrown out of here.’

  ‘Nellie wants to go to the police. Get me thrown in the calaboose. Maybe make you her next houseboy. But you can bloody well forget that.’ He bent over to light a cigarette. ‘Natives kill natives. No one’s going to put me behind bars for that. And the flute—it’s not exactly the frieze of the fucking Parthenon and nobody cared how Elgin got that except for a few sentimental Greeks.’

  ‘I want the governor of the station to know there could be trouble between the Mumbanyo and the Tam, that’s all.’ Her voice was thin, alien to me.

  ‘Nell,’ I said.

  She shook her head fiercely at my tone. ‘Please, go to bed, Bankson. Take Fen and go.’

  Without a fight Fen followed me out of the room.

  When we got down to the second floor I said, ‘What happened up there?’

  ‘Nothing. Marital argy-bargy.’

  I grabbed him and shoved him against the wall. His body was completely relaxed, as if this were something he was used to. ‘What was that noise I heard up there? What hit the ground?’

  ‘Her duffel. It was on the bed and I chucked it to the floor. Christ.’ He waited for me to let him go then opened his door.

  I returned to my room and stood for a long time in the center of it, watching the ceiling, but I heard nothing the rest of the night.

  Outside my room next morning was a hotel laundry bag, half full. I brought it to my bed and took out the items one by one: a pair of leather shoes, a tortoiseshell comb, a silver bracelet, her wrinkled blue dress. At the bottom, a note for me.

  You have already done so much that I am ashamed to ask for one thing more. Will you give these things to Teket when you go back, and ask him to take them to Lake Tam the next time he visits? The bracelet is for Bani, the comb for Wanji, the dress for Sali, and the shoes for Malun. Ask him to say to Malun that she is tight in my stomach. Teket’s cousin will know how to say it.

  Please let me go. Don’t say anything more or it will make it worse. I am going to try and fix what I can.

  At the quai, the ship hovered over everything. I helped with their bags, chased down a porter.

  ‘Last time to tie her shoes,’ Fen said. His flute was wrapped and tied tight, and he set it down gently to shake my hand.

  I turned to her. Her face looked small and rigid and miserable. We hugged. I held her close and too long. ‘I don’t want to let you go,’ I
breathed in her ear.

  But I did. I let her go. And they boarded their ship.

  27

  I returned to the Kiona. Teket punished me for my long disappearance by not talking to me for the first two days. A few of the old women harangued me on his behalf, but no one else seemed bothered, and the children resumed their habit of following me around, begging to try on my pig’s tusk and waiting for me to discard something—an empty tin, an old typewriter ribbon, a used tube of toothpaste—for their amusement. The rains had finally come and the river was high but hadn’t flooded over yet. The women went out to their gardens in pointy leaf ponchos and the children made what looked like cities in the mud.

  They held the Wai they had promised me. Despite all my interviews, my hundreds of questions to hundreds of Kiona about this ceremony, I had got it all wrong. I had missed the complexity of it. Part bawdy, part historical, and part tragic, the ceremony elicited a greater range of emotions than I had realized the first time round. There was a reenactment of their crocodile origins and their cannibal past. Ancestors were brought back to life briefly as their clay death masks were worn by their descendants. Women in war paint and penis gourds chased men in reed skirts till they got them pinned down, then they scraped their bare buttocks on the men’s legs—the ultimate Kiona insult—which made the audience cry with laughter. I sat with Teket and his family and took as many notes on their reactions as I did on the ceremony itself. That night I stayed up late, leaning against my gum tree and writing Nell a fifteen-page letter she wouldn’t receive until summer.

  Two days later, I left.

  I’d arranged for Minton to pick me up, take me to Lake Tam, then drop me in Angoram, from where I would make arrangements to get back to Sydney. Teket agreed to come with me to the lake and stay on with his cousin for a visit.

  Minton arrived early and in good spirits, until Teket climbed into the boat after we’d loaded it up with my bags.